Android-powered Lego Rubik’s Cube solver beats world record

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If you had an Android-powered device, a pile of Lego bricks, and a Rubik’s Cube, what would you decide to do with your time? Make a robot that could solve said cube faster than you could of course! That is what some enterprising geeks did, and they have a video to prove it.

Called the Cubestormer II, this ingenious robot is made entirely out of Lego, including four Mindstorms NXT kits. For the brain and processing power, the creators chose to use a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone since development on Android is open, making it much easier to get a custom app together to control the machine. Using a Bluetooth connection, the S II communicates with the ARM processors in the NXT kits, telling them which way to manipulate the cube to reach a solution.

Using the camera on the smartphone, Cubestormer II anaylzes each face of the cube, running the images through a two phase algorithm that is optimized to make use of the dual core processor the S II sports. From there, the app figures out the best way to solve the cube, then interprets that information into the movements for the robot. While all of that is going on, the phone is also using OpenGL to display a 3D image of the progress of the solution to the puzzle alongside timing the solve.

How long does it take for all of this to happen and the cube to be solved? 5.32 seconds. At the world championships held last weekend, the winner scored a time of 7.68 seconds (the world record is 5.66 seconds), which is impressive indeed, but there is one variable that makes the Cubestormer II even faster than its human counterpart: Humans get a chance to inspect the cube before trying to solve it, which is not measured in their final timed result. The Cubestormer II inspects as well as solves during its operation, making it that much quicker than the best in the (human) world at solving a Rubik’s Cube.